After Calling Him - Revised

A quick note: Dispatches, fairytale poems, and poems-in-progress are on pause! I’ve pre-scheduled this Friday’s dispatch + The Little Mermaid Part 8 next week. These were both meant for July, but took me much longer to write than anticipated. I’ll be away from writing here until September 14th, navigating rest + some personal things. Please look forward to more essays & poems in mid-September! Thank you all so very much for reading. 🤍

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Dear friends 🍂 🍁 🪶

I hope you’re as safe & well as you can be. :)

I don’t have too much to share about this poem…I love soup & I love the women in my life. This poem is a braid, perhaps: An imagined yet real setting, a supposed ‘I’, and an amalgamation of mothers I both do & don’t know.

Thank you so much for reading, as always. Please take care of yourselves (as well as you’re able). ❤️‍🩹

With care & gratitude,

Mik

But how did you stay so calm,
Mom? I painted the saucepan with a wooden spoon, 
spreading boiled tomatoes, squash, sweet potatoes. Steamy pulp 
simmered with onion, garlic, salt, red pepper. Weren’t you angry? 
Flavours sharpened each other. I slit a rye loaf open,  
fist with hole enough for a butter knife handle, steak knives
in the dishwasher, lathered in red vegetable gut. My garden’s ripe bodies
softened under the heat, sweating out blood-dense juice.
The trick, I said, is when you bring a sauce from boil to simmer:
never turn the stove off. While you stir flesh, you should still feel
the heat in your face from pot, to plate,
to teeth, to tongue, 
to throat, to stomach, to
warmth you can give, love you can serve. 
Aren’t you hungry, too? 

• A new issue, hot off the press at The 44 North, featuring my own writing & interviews, but so much more.

• A new dispatch, from St. John’s, Newfoundland. Next coming this Friday!

• The next installment of my fairytales-in-verse series: “The Little Mermaid” - Part 7. Part 8 Coming Next Week!

• For the one-and-only, wonderful Conscious Writers Collective, I write previews for our upcoming guest speakers! Take a peek here.

• Full archive here 🫆❤️‍🔥